Amaroq

I came across information about this group or something who identifies themselves as Anti-Idiotarians. They have a manifesto and everything. http://www.catb.org/~esr/aim/index.html As far as I can tell, the entirety of this manifesto is consistent with the standard Objectivist approach to terrorists and war. It's a breath of fresh air to see a group of people other than Objectivists who know what the hell is going on and what the hell to do about it. Does anyone have any info on these people? I'd like to find a forum or something to get in contact with some of these people. (A quick google search turned up only iffy results. I may look deeper into it soon.) Judging by their manifesto, these people may be good potential allies or even potential converts to Objectivism.

I'm not sure what the motivation was to choose Israel as the second. xD I think it's safe to assume people who didn't like him voted for North Korea. People who did like him, who knows.

http://tweeter.faxo.com/Justin_Bieber_My_World_Tour There was a poll recently for people to vote on which country to send Justin Beiber, one of the most hated Disney child stars ever, on his world tour. The People have spoken. He's going to North Korea!

I would personally say it becomes an individual as soon as it's outside of the mother's body and capable of sustaining its own life separate from hers. I think this solves the question of when it becomes an individual. Because even if it is capable of surviving outside the mother's body before it's born, if it's still inside of her, its life still depends on what she wants to do with her body. For example, if the unborn baby is capable of surviving, but it hasn't been born yet, it could be removed via a c-section. However, the infant is still counting on the mother to allow her stomach to be cut open, so I don't think it gets to be an individual yet. However, once the infant has either been birthed or removed via some surgical means, it becomes an individual.

I didn't feel like reading all 59 pages of this thread, so forgive me if I've missed anything or if anyone has already said this. It doesn't matter how conscious or how human the fetus is. It could have the intelligence of Einstein and be capable of tapping Morse Code through the mother's stomach. Before the fetus is born, it is a parasite that can't survive without living off of the mother's body. Before it is capable of sustaining itself, she has the right to end this dependency whenever she wants. Even if it were possible to transplant an embryo into some sort of test tube and grow it outside the mother's body, who is going to pay for this procedure? Even if this technology existed, the mother would still have a right to an abortion. Growing an unwanted embryo in a tube would be fine if someone voluntarily agreed to pay for the procedure and if the mother voluntarily agreed to have the extraction performed on her. But those conditions must be met. As for children who are already born, there's a big distinction between a fetus and a birthed infant. One is a parasite on the mother's body that she can end at any time, due to her right to life. The other is capable of sustaining its life outside of hers, and its right to life is now secure due to this. Once the infant has been born, if nobody has volunteered to take care of it for them, the parents are now obligated to raise the child. The reason they have to raise it now is because they created an individual and put that individual into a situation where it depends on them to live. Not taking care of an individual who you placed in a dependent position would be an initiation of force.

I would say I support the threat of a military response if the rigs aren't given back to their owners. A foreign government has initiated force against Americans. If not a military response, then what kind of response is possible? Police? The police are here to retaliate against the initiation of force from American citizens against other American citizens. The military is here for the same purpose, but for foreign powers initiating force against American citizens, rather than criminals. Do we have to respect another country's right to be sovereign when it conflicts with our citizens' rights?

I didn't mean to give the impression that they were giving a religious-based criticism of Objectivism. They are giving a philosophical criticism. I was just saying that the header at the top of their page suggests a context of these people having religious motivations for their philosophical attack. I haven't read much of it and I haven't explored their site at all really, so my context here is extremely limited. So don't take my word for it. xD I just made a judgment for myself based on their site header and I don't see any value to be gained for myself in spending more time reading their site.

I'm not really interested in reading the whole thing. From the text in their header, I get the impression they're attacking Oism for its denial of religion. And they also have subtley misunderstood Oism within the first few paragraphs of the first page. Or at least they appear to be ignorant of some important aspects of Oism. Like that Rand wasn't an empiricist. She rejected the dichotomy between intrinsic and subjective and put forth a third alternative, objective. This will quickly and easily explain the trichotomy if you haven't seen it already. http://objectivism101.com/Lectures/Lecture29.shtml

I haven't read The Fountainhead yet. I plan to sometime. But this comment of yours kind of stuck out to me. I oftentimes find myself doing the same thing. How does it make you feel when you compare yourself to someone whose skills are superior to you? Does it make you feel inferior or like you are worth less than someone if their skills are better than yours? This is a problem that I've had before, and sometimes still do. I personally believe that it comes from trying to judge yourself against people from an unbiased, outside-of-yourself point of view. I don't know what Oism would "officially" say about this, but my advice is to take a more self-centered approach to how you look at other people. Don't make an unbiased comparison from outside your perspective. Simply look at them from your perspective. If they are better than you, look at them from your own eyes. If you don't compare yourself to them, you should be able to look up to them and see that their superior skills can be valuable to you. Or you should at least be able to admire them. (Granted their attitude allows you to see them in a positive light.) Another good thing to remember is that all values must be good for someone, for some purpose. There is no "He is better than me." It has to be "He is good, to whom and for what?" If the "to whom" is "to you", then you should be able to look at people of superior skill without it effecting your self esteem.

If/when I have children someday, I won't let them touch the public school system with a ten foot pole. Profoundly evil bullshit like this just makes that even more clear to me.

http://www.resistnet.com/video/flotilla-ch...source=activity Here you go. I love it, haha.

That was amazing, haha. I loved it.

I think people have always had problems with getting kicked randomly from the chat, even on the old server. The issue I've raised in this thread is the whole chat and website going down at the same time due to that database error. If people randomly lose the connection but others are able to stay in the chat, that's probably just that the chat sucks. xD

I always encountered the problem while chatting late at night (my time). The chat would appear to lose connection, and at first, reloading it simply caused it to try for a long time to load, with nothing actually happening. And then stopping and trying to reload it again would bring about those errors. At the same time, the forum would also go down with the Joomla logo saying that the site can't connect to the database. So the problem always happened to me while I was using the chat, but it affected both the chat and the forum. It would always be a half hour to an hour or so before the chat and forum would be back up again. I'll be on the lookout as you asked, sNerd, and I'll update if I see the problem again.

Pardon the inflammatory thread title and subtitle, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed that this site regularly goes down with database connection errors now. I'm sure the admin can see the error logs, but I'll say it here: The errors that the chat shows when trying to load it during this "down time" always has something to do with there being more database connections than the maximum allowed. This issue didn't start happening until the site got moved to the server it's currently on, and I know several other members are also frustrated over this regularly occurring erroneous downtime.

Indeed. The man narrating the video makes this obvious. The Muslims living there think what's going on is A-Okay. It's perfectly fine for Hamas to kill its own people and send young men, women, and children off to die as suicide bombers, but if one Israeli soldier kills one Iranian in defense of his own country, it causes a Muslim uproar. Also, if you watched part 2 of the video, you see another instance of Muslim hypocrisy. When 3000 Americans died on 9/11, there were Muslim men, women, and children dancing and cheering in the streets. But when the tables are turned and Israel kills Muslims in the course of a retaliation against them, they play the victim. (You also don't see Israelis dancing and cheering in the streets when they hear about this, as far as I know.) Apologists in the US like to cite "examples" of the US meddling in the middle-east, and then tell us that it's our fault that the terrorists attacked us on 9/11. But the Muslim people themselves are hypocrites. They're perfectly fine with their own governments slaughtering their own people, but they become enraged when anyone else does so in retaliation of violence that they themselves started. What's the difference? One is doing so from their religion, the other is an outside influence.

It's actually the same link as yours, with the odd characters edited out. Just re-pasting yours in your post should fix it. As to the video itself, I think this guy is pretty much spot-on. And it's nice to hear it coming from someone with an arabian accent, because what moron could further ignore the truth about the middle-east when it's coming from a middle-eastern man, right? It's like, getting to see the story from the inside.

Damn. First thing I would've done upon finding out that it's a rare video is download it so it isn't lost when it's taken down. EDIT: Your URL was messed up. When you click it, there's some random urlencoded characters in the middle of it.

While you're at it, cook me a big, thick, juicy steak. That's the only thing culturally fucking acceptable to me. Thank you very much. Goddamnit I can't believe anyone seriously upholds this.

I personally wouldn't go out of my way to drive to do any sort of protest unless it was near enough to my house that it took minimal effort to get to. Driving around to places and holding up signs isn't the only way to oppose something. Pulling up an isolated concrete like that is pointless. I oppose the Muslim mosque so strongly because Islam is Islam. Moderate Muslims are only good people for being moderate. The less seriously they take their religion, the better people they are. Most Muslims living in America today have departed from their religion at least partially and accepted Western values such as reason, rights, and the separation of church and state. You could say that the Muslims who took down the twin towers were radicals, but it would be more accurate to say that they were Islamic fundamentalists. They took their religion seriously and it inspired them to do what they did. This goes for Christianity as well. Christianity today is watered down. But don't forget all of the trouble the Christian fundamentalists are causing, and don't forget that Christianity in its purer form is responsible for the Crusades and the Dark Ages. Religions, in their undiluted forms, taken seriously by their followers, become oppressive and destructive. When you identify this, you can place the blame where it rightfully belongs. Islam, in its undiluted form, taken seriously by its followers, is responsible for terrorism and oppression originating from the Middle-East, amongst other things.

I'll admit that I think I made a mistake. I was under the impression that the mosque was going to be built a much shorter distance away from the twin towers, and that it wasn't already built yet. However, I still consider it to be both an insult to Americans and a victory flag to the Muslim world that there is a mosque that close to the twin towers ruins. I apologize if I committed the argument from intimidation fallacy earlier. But I do believe this action is morally reprehensible and ought to be condemned.

It is a free country. That doesn't mean people have to stay silent about it. Not only can we pass moral judgment, but we should pass moral judgment on people and organizations for their actions. When the religion that destroyed those towers and killed a few thousand American citizens gets to erect a monument in its name right next to the ruins, I'd question the judgment of anyone who isn't outraged.

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/0...oves_ahead.html Yeah, let's put an Islamic mosque right next to the ruins of the Twin Towers. Thank you very much and fuck you too.

Holy shit. If you shaved off his goatee and straightened and died his hair brown, Mark LeVine would look almost exactly like my former hardcore vegan roommate. His mannerisms and how he attacks Horowitz are almost exactly the same too. Maybe even argument from intimidation as well.

This is the kind of thing that needs to happen more often. Kudos to Horowitz for putting her on the spot like that. They cannot be allowed to occupy any sort of moral high ground any more. Anyone who condones or even refuses to condemn terrorism should be instilled with shame for their beliefs.